Don’t Stop the Dance

On the 20th May 2025 I published my last post ‘Real an Unreal’, from Rishikesh in Uttarakhand northern India where I had spent the previous several weeks. Then I returned to the UK where I have been since, negotiating a different set of life circumstances and the challenges these brought. One of the final things I remember from my time in Rishikesh was dancing on the rooftop of the apartment block I was staying in in Upper Tapovan, to a really beautiful piece of music against the spectacular backdrop of the Himalayan foothills and the Ganges river glittering in the distance. It felt sublime, but in retrospect I can see how it also marked a kind of formal end to that protracted post pilgrimage period, when I had been constantly drawn back to try to recreate the magic of the pilgrimage years, but in reality to process the newly emergent self in its several stages. That dance was like drawing a line – finally – underneath a difficult and obscure period and allow space for a new one.

As if to underline this, on 5th August, my guide and driver Sahdev Rana contacted me with the terrible news of the destruction of Dharali – my special place and epicentre of the Pilgrimage – buried under an immense landslide during the heavy seasonal monsoon. He sent video clips taken by residents who  had filmed it from the temple the other side of the valley, as vast walls of rock and mud surged down the river course, destroying buildings, submerging everything including the ancient Kalp Kedar temple, location of several of my private pujas.  I remembered the old baba who lived in his camp at the side of the suspension footbridge, and the many people I had known and counted as friends there, and knew in my heart that this episode marked the ending of my relationship with Gangotri and that sublime period more than anything else. Absolutely there was no going back. And Sahdev has never been able to bring himself to go back either, special place as it had always been for him too.

Perhaps it has taken me this long to process that event sufficiently to be able to write about it; perhaps that is one major reason why I have never felt inclined to write a post since. It will never not be painful for me, but it now has been consigned to a kind of shrine in my heart where I might occasionally visit and lay flowers, but life goes on. There must be new special places and new dances to dance.

As I write I am planning to return to India in early September, for the entirely pragmatic purpose of getting my teeth fixed, which is to say finish the programme of restorative work undertaken in Kerala two years ago, about as non spiritual as you may imagine. This visit I will stay in the south and allow the north to recede into the past it now needs to be. I plan to make a short pilgrimage to Chidambaram, the famous Chola period temple to Shiva as Nataraja – the Lord of the Dance – as old as York Minster and dating back into 10th century CE. I last went there during the visit I made in early 2019, which I regarded as a sort of dress rehearsal for the main pilgrimage period planned for later that year. But I shall base myself in Fort Kochi where I lived for four months back in 2024. And continue to write at the Pandhal Cafe midway along the tropical shore front on my morning walks.

I had never thought to go back to India again, exhausted across several personal dimensions of the whole travel experience and challenge of that country, and feeling I should probably make a more determined effort to settle down and rediscover what it was to be a British citizen whilst I still had the ability to do so. But it wasn’t to be. Prosaically, my teeth have determined that!

Now, as I continue to refine my plans and come to terms with the thought of going back, I do feel more at peace with it. There are new dances to be danced and places to dance them. And nowhere more evocatively symbolic than the ancient temple of Shiva Nataraja at Chidambaram. Don’t stop the dance!

 

 

Featured image from: https://cultureandheritage.org/why-chidambaram-nataraja-temple-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-profound-documentary-subjects

There is also an account describing the destruction of Dharali in the companion site In the Spirit: ‘Continuing In the Spirit’. dated 22nd October 2025.